I’ve used the rsync solution for docker-sync. Simple, but the downside is that newly created files in the container are not shared outside. That’s not generally a problem except when some code is generated from inside the container (e.g. Doctrine migrations). When needed, a normal mounting for those directories can still be used, or (more complicated), the file can be copied into the host with a docker cp command.

Other downsides are the slowness to rsync watch (a few seconds that can be annoying in some cases), that leads me to the next point:

PHPStorm file watcher

PHPStorm supports the execution of custom scripts on save (file watchers). The idea is having those file watchers to perform an immediate docker cp inside the container with the modified file.

The screenshot should be clear enough. Replace docker bin with the real path of your docker executable (not the symlink), and <CONTAINER_NAME> with your docker container, and adjust /app/ to have docker cp copying files where your docker container expects.

Depending on your needs, you might want to adjust your shares, and decide whether vendor directory needs to be watched or not.

Note: You can’t just use the file watcher, or you’ll have the rebuild (or manually copy all the files) any time you switch branch.

I’ve finished reading it, and I took some notes while reading. Some concepts and suggestions were obvious, as I hear them many times from the community (blogs, conferences, colleagues) or I’ve already personally experienced them. I’ll paste those my notes here, with the hope that you can find something valuable from looking through them.

XDebug is a free PHP extension to debug variables of your applications. Combined with Netbeans for PHP debug features (break points, variable watching and flow execution navigation, see screenshot on the left), it allows to have a complete debug environment.

What it’s really interesting is the possibility to place breakpoints in any file, even though not called directly in the local URL. That is required when working with web applications with URL routing/rewriting sudh as MVC applications (Zend Framework, Symfony etc..) where the PHP code in a controller action does not match with its path in the local URL.

Here are the easy steps to follow in order to configure Xdebug for Linux Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I’ll write the full commands to make it easier by copy & paste.

-) download the xdebug extension

sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug

-) check where the extension is installed

sudo find /usr/lib/php5 | grep xdebug

-) open the php.ini file (inside apache)

sudo vim /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

and add these lines at the end of the file (replace with the right module path)

(*): Xdebug is unstable with this options, however I found it very useful and enough stable for my purposes. It’s possible that Netbeans crashes with the current version, restart it in case.

5) Netbeans: right click on the project ->properties->Run configuration -> run as local website. Insert the (virtualhost) local URL. Do not insert any index file if the application uses URL routing, or Netbeans will launch the relative script path in the URL.

6) Netbeans: place your breakpoints by clicking on the line number, then start the debug (Under Debug->debug or Ctrl+F5). Netbeans will open the browser at the local URL, and when reaching the breakpoitns, netbeans will show a red icon on the line.
Depending on the browser, the focus will return to Netbeans (go manually if it does not).
Select the code / expression to watch/evaluate. Netbeans will show a baloon tip with the value. Alternatively, right click and select “new watch” to have the expression and the values appearing in the debug panel.
Use F5 to go to the next breakpoint, F7/F8 to step into/over.

As mentioned, Xdebug is unstable with the option set in the step 4. If watching some expressions crashes netbeans, use the “new watch” option instead.

The executable of PHP supports the ‘-l’ option, that checks the syntax instead of parsing the file.
Using the command ‘find’, it’s possibile to do a interesting operation: syntax checking of all the files recursively, to avoid parse errors in some script !!

“monit is a utility for managing and monitoring processes, files, directories and devices on a Unix system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations. E.g. monit can start a process if it does not run, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses to much resources. You may use monit to monitor files, directories and devices for changes, such as timestamps changes, checksum changes or size changes.

Monit is controlled via an easy to configure control file based on a free-format, token-oriented syntax. Monit logs to syslog or to its own log file and notifies you about error conditions via customizable alert messages. Monit can perform various TCP/IP network checks, protocol checks and can utilize SSL for such checks. Monit provides a http(s) interface and you may use a browser to access the monit program.”[ref] .